Many international students come to Canada to improve their English language proficiency and develop friendships with Canadians and other international students. However, gaining access to host nationals (i.e., Canadians) is not an easy task for most English as a second language (ESL) learners. Factors such as language proficiency may hamper…

Research and development in language teacher education and, more recently, teacher accreditation has had enormous impact on the professional lives of ESL teachers in Canada. There has been less interest, however, in examining the career development and employment experiences of accredited ESL teachers as they transition from TESL programs to ESL…

This study investigated the continuous influence of self-assessment on EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' self-efficacy. The participants, divided into an experimental and a control group, were 57 Iranian EFL learners in an English-language institute. The participants' self-efficacy was measured through a questionnaire that…

This article examines the treatment of culture and the development of interculturality in the transcripts of a complete 36-hour ESL course organized by a community center in Montreal. The adult participants came from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The adult second-language class has been identified as a potentially rich context…

This article presents the development, rollout, and subsequent uptake of the Alberta Teachers of English as a Second Language (ATESL) document Best Practices for "Adult English as a Second Language (ESL)/Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) Programming" in the light of literature on teacher engagement with second-language…

This follow-up study reexamines the state of the teaching of pronunciation in ESL classes across Canada. The purpose of the survey was twofold: to gain a snapshot of current practices and to compare this with the picture of 10 years ago. We based the current work on Breitkreutz, Derwing, and Rossiter's (2001) survey asking teachers about…

Investigations into the role of context have often failed to find a positive role for this in vocabulary learning. This study, following a line of research concerned with the role of context, adds to the literature by examining the effect of three consecutive context sentences instead of one. Thirty-three Iranian EFL learners were asked to learn…

Issues such as the linguistic and informational barriers to health care must be addressed if immigrant women are to achieve optimum health status for themselves and their families. This study used a participatory photonovel as a tool to educate ESL-speaking immigrant women about health information. This research illustrates five ESL-speaking…

This article highlights how citizenship and citizenship education are sites of contestation. I have analyzed the process of curriculum making of the LINC 4 & 5 Curriculum Guidelines (TCDSB, 1999) through three stages: from production, through reception, to implementation. The production stage is investigated by contrasting commentaries from two…

The aim of this article is to raise awareness in L2 education about the relationship between second-language learners' linguistic choices in the L2 and their identities. The author reviews empirical research and language-learning narratives that show that L2 learners may purposely use nonstandard L2 forms. Using a poststructuralist framework to…

In this article, an ESL instructor reflects on her preconceptions of power and control in the classroom. In the community-based program described, learners determined not only when and where classes would take place, but also the aims, curriculum, and content of the program. The challenges of this setting required the instructor to redefine her…

A survey of 63 employees in LINC programs in Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta Indicated that the mandate of LINC to incorporate information on "Canadian values" remains partly unfulfilled. Although professionally trained ESL instructors may be equipped to incorporate Canadian values into the content of classroom instruction, those who lack…